Part 20 (1/2)
People certainly liked him better as an ”honest sinner.”
”'Wotsumdever ull Bob do next? That's wot I'd lik' to hear,'” said Mary; ”'fust it's a woman, and then it's drink, and then it's the devil, and then it's G.o.d: reckon he's tried every way to disgrace us as he knows.'”
”'I thought I'd married a man,'” is Mabel's thought, ”'and now it seems I've married a Young Man--a Young Man's Christian a.s.sociation.'”
Robert's love for her became more diffident and beseeching, for its glamours and ardours she had no response, for its doubts and hesitations she had nothing but contempt. ”'I believe you'd make me as big a fool as yourself, if you could,'” she said. The people in the district get to the point where they ”'woan't taake any more preaching from a chap wot's bin a byword in the Parish fur loosness this five years.'” So Clem tries to make him ”hoald his tongue,” but he has come to look upon himself as an apostle sent to the Gentiles, so he becomes a tramping Methodist, like the hero of Sheila Kaye-Smith's first book.
”On a warm March Sunday, when the hedges were brushed with green bloom, and the willow catkin made creamy splashes in the brown of the woods, Robert went off to Goudhurst.”
Getting tired with his long walk, ”he suddenly felt that it would be good to turn out of the lane, and lie down on the earth-smelling gra.s.s of one of those big, quiet fields, just where the shadow of the hedge was lacy on the edge of the suns.h.i.+ne ... to smell the earth, and feel its sweet, living strength as he lay on it ... while round him the primrose leaves uncurled, and the spotted leaves of the field orchid broke the green film of their bract, and the warm daisies breathed out a scent that was the caught essence of spring heat and honey ...” but he pulled himself up short ... this was the devil tempting him. ”He distrusted a yearning for the beauty of the fields ... of old times he used never to think twice about the country--but since his conversion he had had ... temptations to turn to mere beauty.” The conflict in his mind affected his preaching powers adversely. In the evening he meets a tramp whom he turns from the drink and is seduced by him into sleeping out of doors. ”A strange, sweet peace had dropped upon him at last--he had forgotten the rubs and humiliations of his Sabbath ... but he did not sleep till nearly dawn. The night seemed awake ... it was full of a living scent of earth and gra.s.s, which mixed strangely with the musty dry scent of the hay. There was a continual flutter and whisper in the hedge, queer m.u.f.fled sounds came from the next field ... he slept just when the rich blue of the darkness was turning grey.”
Mabel was furious with him, but he continued his irregular ministry. ”It belonged to the casual nights he spent under the stars--soft purple nights of June, when the horns of the yellow moon burned above the woods, and the air was warm, and thick with the smell of hay. He a.s.sociated it with the sweet, straggling sunlight of late afternoon or early morning, with village wells, and cool deserted lanes ... he made no wonderful stir among the people, either for good or evil.” He was not stoned at the cross-roads, any more than he was thronged by repentant sinners.
These accounts of his wanderings through Kent and Suss.e.x give Sheila Kaye-Smith a chance to describe more wonderfully and in greater detail than elsewhere the beauties of the nature that she knows and loves so well. In the end he falls in again with the gipsies, and is enticed by them to wrestle with Hannah, his first love, for her soul. He is at first averse from undertaking it: in the end, of course, he does.
”'Oh, Nannie,'” he said, ”'G.o.d loves you. He's never stopped loving you once, for all you've turned against Him, and the cruel things you've done----'”
Then he knew that he was merely declaring his own love for her, and calling it G.o.d's.... He fell on his knees before her, and taking her in his arms, covered her face with kisses. Her husband immediately appears and threatens to blackmail him: ”'This is a fine Gospel, and a d.a.m.n-fine Gospeller.'” He suggests that five pounds might seal their mouths and then----
”'I call five quid nothing for what you've done,'” said Auntie Lovel.
”'The other gentleman had to pay ten, and he scarce got hold of Hannah properly....'”
Robert at last sees the trick and nearly kills Hannah's husband, as a result of which he goes to prison, and Mabel seizes the opportunity to go back to the seaside. When he is released from jail Robert goes to live with Clem, a broken man.
”'Sims to me,'” says Polly, ”'as Bob's life's lik' a green apple tree--he's picked his fruit lik' other men, but it's bin hard and sour instead of sweet. Love and religion--they're both sweet things, folks say, but with Bob they've bin as the hard green apples.'”
Robert goes to see Mabel and discovers that she wants to cut him right out of her life, and he decides to kill himself. He goes out in the dead of night to do it ... and finds at last that the love of the soil is too much for him. ”The mistrusted earth had been his comfort all through that wonderful year.... Memories came to him of footprints in the white dust of Kentish lanes, of big fields tilted to the sunset, of ponds like moons in the night, of dim shapes of villages in a twilight thickened and yellowed by the chaffy mist of harvest, of the spilt glory of big solemn stars, the mystery and the wonder of sounds at night, sounds of animals creeping, sounds of water, sounds of birds.... The fields and the farms and the sunrise were calling him ... 'I am your G.o.d--doan't you know me?... Didn't you know that I've bin with you all the time?
That every time you looked out on the fields ... you looked on Me? Why woan't you look and see how beautiful and homely and faithful and loving I am? I'm plighted to you wud the troth of a mother to her child. You lost Me in the mists of your own mind.' ...”
Once more he is converted. Full of his new Salvation he hastens to enlighten Clem.
”'But now I see as how He's love ... and He's beauty.... He's in the fields maaking the flowers grow and the birds sing and the ponds have that lovely liddle white flower growing on 'em....'” Again he decides to convert the world despite Clem's protests. ”'You can't go every time you're convarted preaching the Gospel about the plaace.'” But he goes ... and Hannah's husband stirs up the roughs to duck him in a mill pond: they are more thorough than they mean to be and he dies of his injuries.
'”I've a feeling as if I go to the Lord G.o.d I'll only be going into the middle of all that's alive ... if I'm wud Him I can't never lose the month of May.'”
And the last words are fittingly left to Clem and Polly. ”'He wur a decent chap, Poll ... he wur a good chap, the best I've known.'
”'Surelye,' said Polly, 'if Bob had only had sense he might have come to be a saint and martyr--who knows? He had the makings of one; but he had no sense--if he'd had sense he'd be alive now.'
”'Reckon he did wot he thought right.'
”'That's why it's a pity it wurn't sense.'”
This study of a man strange, dignified, real and crystal-clear is not likely quickly to perish. Those who have any trace of the pa.s.sion for the soil that possesses nearly all the characters in Sheila Kaye-Smith's books, and most Englishmen have it in some degree, will not need to look for any further reason why they should read her novels. All lovers of pure art, all lovers of Nature, all lovers of humanity will find in them satisfaction hardly to be found elsewhere in fiction.
PART III
BOOKS ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE